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By Victor Mora / Staff Writer
By Victor Mora / Staff Writer
The Hippocratic Oath reads: “…I will neither prescribe nor administer a lethal dose of medicine to any patient even if asked nor counsel any such thing nor perform the utmost respect for every human life from fertilization to natural death and reject abortion that deliberately takes a unique human life…”
This is the oath that Dr. Conrad Murray swore when he took the job of a physician.
By violating this oath, a human life was taken away.
It wasn’t just any human, though. Murray himself witnessed the death of the alleged king of pop, Michael Jackson himself.
In his administration of the surgical anesthetic propofol to Jackson, Murray acted less like a physician and more like an enabler.
Is he any different than a drug dealer standing in the shadows of a shady alley providing an addict with heroine?
A Los Angeles County jury didn’t think so when it convicted him of involuntary manslaughter for negligence and frankly, it was the right call to make.
Even if what the Murray’s defense team were saying was true that Jackson did cause his own death, Murray is still responsible for leaving Jackson alone to do so.
When a person goes into cardiac arrest, the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organ, thus depriving oxygen from the body.
The victim of cardiac arrest will lose consciousness and stop normal breathing. Brain injury can occur if cardiac arrest is untreated for more than five minutes.
And what was Murray doing when Jackson stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest under the influence of propofol?
He was on the phone and sending text messages.
According to witness testimony in the trial, Murray failed to perform basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation properly, which can ultimately help a person suffering from cardiac arrest.
Anyone, including a physician, can take an American Heart Association CPR class and learn to help someone in need of breathing.
Did Murray go to upstairs Hollywood medical school with Dr. Nick from The Simpsons? Joking aside, how does a trained physician fumble a basic procedure like CPR?
Witnesses also testified that Murray had delayed in calling for help and immediately lied to paramedics and emergency doctors about it afterward when they arrived on the scene.
It’s easy to get caught up in the celebrity aspect of this trial. How could you not?
One of the most influential men in the music industry, the king of pop, is dead as a result of the careless acts of a physician he thought he could place his trust in.
I remember being a kid and wearing out my old vinyl record of Jackson’s hit single, “Bad.”
There are also moments in time where I can also recall asking my mom for quarters, just so I can play Jackson’s Moonwalker arcade game at the super market for hours on end.
That’s what gets me. Not only did Michael Jackson die, but a little part of my childhood died along with him.
In the back of my mind, I want to shout that Dr. Murray is a good-for-nothing murderer, but I’ll refrain from doing so.
I don’t know what Murray was thinking during this whole ordeal and I don’t know why Jackson felt the need to use a strong prescription drug such as propofol just to get some sleep.
In the end, only Jackson knows the whole truth and unfortunately, he can’t exactly tell the members of the jury if it was he or Murray that administered the drug.
He’s been dead for well over a year.
However, I do know that no matter how you look at this entire situation, everything about it is just plain unfortunate.
